What will the 'Bruce Lee' of El Niños mean for us?

This year’s El Niño weather pattern could be the most powerful yet seen, federal forecasters said, and in Texas, that means rain.

“We’re predicting this El Niño could be among the strongest El Niños in the historical record,” Mike Halpert, the deputy director of the Climate Prediction Center for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said during a teleconference.

This year’s El Niño, dubbed “Bruce Lee” by a National Weather Service blogger, is already the second-strongest for this time of year in more than 60 years of record-keeping, he said.

South-Central Texas is in for an uncharacteristically wet fall that could bring more rain to San Antonio than the city has seen in more than 40 years.

“Pretty much what we’re expecting going into the fall and the winter time is for precipitation to pick up again and for temperatures to cool,” National Weather Service Meteorologist Aaron Treadway said. “We have this El Niño weather pattern going on, so there are warmer temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator that change weather around the globe.”

In an interview posted Thursday on the online edition of Southwest Farm Press magazine, NOAA’s Dr. Klaus Wolter said Texas may be the biggest beneficiary of El Niño.

“Since the late ’90s, Texas has been the only place in the U.S. that received significant impact from El Niño events, “ Wolter told the magazine.

His forecasts calls for greater rainfall in Texas and the possibility of increased precipitation in New Mexico, Colorado and the Midwest.

El Niño, which begins with warmer-than-usual water temperatures in the Eastern Pacific, can affect weather around the world — in the United States, it can bring heavy winter precipitation in California and across the South. El Niño events also have been linked to droughts in Australia and India, more numerous hurricanes in the Pacific Ocean (but fewer in the Atlantic), and a warmer planet overall.

Crops fail or thrive, commerical fishing shifts, more people die of flooding, fewer from freezing. The global economy shifts.

“El Niño is not the end of the world, so you don’t have to hide under the bed. The reality is that in the U.S., an El Niño can be a good thing, ” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.

The federal forecasters announced a greater than 90 percent chance that El Niño would continue all winter for the Northern Hemisphere. The likelihood that the effects will last into early spring is 85 percent, up from last month’s prediction of 80 percent.

Conditions in the Pacific Ocean suggest that what has formed there is as big as anything seen since 1997-98, a system that brought the term “El Niño” into popular culture, and which is remembered for the catastrophic amounts of water it dumped on California, leading to flooding and mudslides.

California receives most of its precipitation in the winter, and that is when the effects of a potent El Niño system are felt.

William Patzert, a climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said this week that many of the factors were in place for a big event, with ocean warming “that rivals what we saw with the great Godzilla El Niño of 1997 and 1998.”